Peter Bart's controversial reign is ending at Variety

For much of the 20th century, Variety was the entertainment industry's bible, a must-read of Hollywood. Barely into the 21st, the venerable trade newspaper has been dethroned by bloggers and collapsing revenue. Now its formidable editor in chief -- who taps out blog posts on a typewriter and reads e-mails on paper -- has ended his 20-year reign as the publication looks to remake itself for the digital age.

Peter Bart, a Quaker-educated New Yorker with a Perry White temper, William F. Buckley vocabulary and owlish countenance who has been the object of both awe and scorn within the industry he has simultaneously embraced and ridiculed, will remain on Variety's masthead. But the post is widely seen throughout Hollywood as ceremonial because he no longer will run the publication's news operation or shape its editorial coverage.

Under the stewardship of Bart, the 104-year-old Variety has struggled with the same problems facing the movie studios and television networks it covers: new competition from the Internet and an economic crisis that is decimating advertiser spending.

After months of speculation, Variety's owners, Reed Business Information, quietly announced Sunday that Bart would be replaced by his No. 2, Timothy M. Gray, as the newspaper's top editor.

Bart's leaving signals the end of an era for both a paper and a colorful, often controversial newsroom leader. Writers and editors say Bart, a former studio executive and newspaper reporter, ran Variety as a fiefdom -- rewarding friends, slighting enemies, pitting reporters and editors against one another -- and all with showman's zeal for self-promotion.

Although Bart's management tactics served the paper well in the 1990s and early into this decade, his influence -- like that of his rival newspaper, the Hollywood Reporter -- has been greatly diminished in recent years, as has his publication's revenue.

For the last six months, Daily Variety's circulation was 24,740, down from a 2001 peak of 35,716. In the first quarter, advertising pages, which were already down sharply from 2007, fell 37%. Like many newspapers, Variety has laid off reporters and editors in recent months, and current issues of the paper have been virtually ad-free.

"This is the worst position publishing has been in for the 30 years since I have been working in the business," said Neil Stiles, Variety's president.